Our Contemporary realities force us to perform faster and better in order to preserve the standard of life considered as comfortable by modern society. The extreme speed of technological progress in every aspect of human activities produces a multitude of electronic tools in order to get the best from all of us. The electronic gadgets which are supposed to help us in our everyday activities, in fact cause more disturbances considerably polluting the social structures. The Contemporary ideals are not longer measured by the intellectual standard of societies but by the economic performance reflected in possessed material goods of all kinds.
Since the beginning of my artistic career, I have always been interested and inspired by the socio-political aspects of our existence. In my artwork I try to express my personal attitude towards these unavoidable changes. In my own ironic way, I try to expose the danger of the road we are all taking because there are no other choices possible. In the present state of our harsh reality, either we follow the stream of changes or we stay behind. To choose to stay behind could probably derail us from the acceptable social canons of modern society. In my visions, I am not trying to criticize nor offer the perfect solutions to our common problems but with my visual irony I hope to make the viewer realize what we are losing and what we are getting in exchange. In my art I am not cultivating a pessimistic attitude towards speeding changes in our world, I have rather an optimistic conclusion about it. The best way to describe my perception of the modern world would be the sentence “what a beautiful catastrophe,” pronounced by Zorba in the end of Nikos Kazantsakis’ famous book, “Zorba, The Greek.” In my images I share Zorba’s optimism about the future of our world.
In principle I have chosen to express my concerns through the images of Ovid’s “Metamorphosis.” Ovid’s mythological history of the world, in addition to other mythological and historical sources, inspires my artistic quest. Depicting the mythological stories through the imagery surrounding us in the modernity of our Contemporary realities is my principal goal. I have chosen to illustrate the myths, which in the best way refer to the Contemporary realities of my concerns. Influenced by the Renaissance linear and chromatic mastery and new wave of artistic concepts of such Contemporary artists as Neo Rauch, John Currin, or Mark Tansey, I would like to illustrate my social concerns in my own artistic approach. By doing so, I would like to connect the ancient cultures to our technological presence as reflected through the allegoric imagery. At the same time I try to explore further the technicalities of drawing on raw canvas mixing the traditional techniques of colored pencils with the chromatic modernity of paint.
Using the raw canvas as a basic surface and background at the same time for my artistic creativity I combine the old and modern traditions of the art of drawing. There is something mysterious about the raw fabric, which I enjoy working on for the purpose of expressing my artistic visions. I find it extremely comfortable for the visual dialogue while transferring my creations on it.
To review the artworks from the Metamorphic Impressions collection click here.
